Fishers of Men – Four Pictures of the Vocation of Following Jesus

Biblical Text: Matthew 4:12-25
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The biblical text is Jesus calling two sets of brothers. It is sandwiched between a notice about John the Baptist and a notice about what the Galilean ministry looked like. So the theme is vocation or call. What does it mean to be called? What does this particular call – to follow Jesus – mean? This sermon looks at four pictures and hones in on one theme of all four. The call of discipleship must take primacy or it means nothing.

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Which Way Out of the Desert

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Biblical Text: Luke 15:1-10

These are both parables of prodigal grace and repentance. Dogmatically this is one of those areas where you are forced to nod your head yes to a couple of things in contradiction. It is all grace. The shepherd calls and carries home. If so, then why repent? State of grace, oh happy condition, sin as a please and still have remission. But it is grace. Repentance is the first step of the Kingdom. If that is the case, then why do I need grace? I just do the work of repentance. But that requires grace. Aquinas had it all worked out. Unfortunately Aquinas was out of favor intellectually when Luther came around. But that is neither here nor there.

My take is that these texts set in their context are suppose to be funny. They are absurd in a way that illuminates both our lost condition and the prodigal nature of grace. You have to get the joke, you have to accept the premise of grace, for the rest to make sense. But once you accept he premise it is one of those “oh, crap” moments. I was lost, but now I’m found. Grace comes with a hidden imperative. Home is that way. Go joyfully.

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The Cost of Discipleship

Text: Luke 14:25-35
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Luke 12 to 14 is tough to preach on in the current context. Even the “easy” text of Luke 12:22-34 if you are preaching it in context is not so easy. I think most of us here those words and immediately think – “ok, this Jesus thing isn’t going to mess up my life, don’t worry, I can still have my stuff.” And that is almost exactly the opposite of the intention. A disciple is to be a fearless witness (Luke 12:4-12), and the assumed context of witness is persecution. Jesus is heading to Jerusalem and the cross. In the midst of that, don’t worry, your Father takes care of the sparrow, right? So keep walking. All these things that might be taken away here, will be added in abundance in the Kingdom. (Luke 12:31-34)

Then you careen through “not peace, but division (Luke 12:49ff)”, “the barren fig tree”, “the narrow door”, “Jerusalem’s hardness of heart”, “the great banquet – where the invitation are cast off for meaningless excuses”, and it culminates in this text.

Sometimes Jesus sees a crowd and his gut is churned because the are like sheep without a shepherd. But just as often Jesus gathers a crowd, he turns and says something that causes most to flee or go home. I’m importing that more full account from John 6:52-71, but you can take Luke and observe the lessons Jesus teaches when he turns toward the crowds. This would seem to be one of those second crowds. We are on the way to Jerusalem, to the cross, he thinks we should know.

Why it is tough, it because of the quote from Dr. Beck at the start of the sermon. The church today operates on a different model than the early church. The church today gathers crowds and tries to keep them no matter what. Oh it tries to encourage them to places and things where spiritual growth can occur, but what it never does intentionally is what Jesus does – spell out our spiritual state. That is left for you to intuit. The church at different times would force a counting of the cost first. Are your priorities Kingdom priorities? If you don’t hate the best things in your life (wife, husband, family, job) when they get in the way of your walk with Jesus, you can’t be a disciple.

In that counting is also the grace. Like Peter realized when others turned away – “Where shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.” This is Jesus at his most Protestant. You have a choice to make – the hard narrow path to life or the easy path to destruction. And once you choose, don’t turn back – because what good is salt that has lost its saltiness? Where can it be re-salted?

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Walking to Jerusalem/Marching to Zion

Luke 13:22-30
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I received more comments about this sermon than almost any in 5 years. The pessimist in me is saying “and you are going to pay for each one of those comments.”

In the worship service as a whole there was an interweaving of hymns and songs including one of my favorites, I Walk in Danger all the Way, Some of the VBS kids shared with us a couple of the songs from the week including “Stand Strong” and the one I reference in the Sermon Marching to Zion. But you don’t need that thicker worship setting to get the sermon.

The gospel point, the core of the text, is that it is Jesus alone who is walking to Jerusalem. And that walk ends outside the city walls. At the place of the skull. We can’t march into the city of God. We only enter through the narrow door, at the foot of the cross, through repentance. There is no “we” marching to Zion. The question is are you walking there? Is your walk with Jesus all the way?

The audio will be added later. Our guy who volunteers to convert the files (and has the stuff to actually do it) took a much deserved break. His son did the recording (thank you!), but the digital conversion is coming.

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The Household Gods

Bible Text: Mark 10:17-22
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One of theses days I’m going to write a novel with that title. It’s an allusion to Gen 31:19,32 and as with so much else from that Ur-Book, its a powerful story that we play out again and again like a musical fugue.

The Gospel text for this day is one of those repeats and an appropriate horror story as we get to Halloween. The contrasting character to Jesus is a man who knows he’s trapped by his household gods but can’t leave them. The task of discipleship is to learn to leave them behind. This man’s question is every man’s question or should be. That novel, amongst the characters, the protagonist is the one who in the eyes of the other characters has failed miserably but who is actually the only one who is free.

The big struggle this week was the question have I let the gospel predominate. I went back and forth in my pondering about that call to deep discipleship and how it might be taken. It could be a law proclamation of the second kind. All one might hear is the refrain to give up the idols and the application to do more and feel convicted. We know the responses when told to do something we really don’t want to do before we are ready to break the fugue. It could also be a law proclamation of the third kind. What must I do? Look at the commandments. That is how God intended us to live. Actually putting requirements back on people seems like a reversal of the gospel. If you are proclaiming the captives free, how then can you put the chains back on?

But Jesus didn’t seem to have any such qualms about being explicit. And that gets to a core recognition of the gospel. We can talk about the gospel in those freedom metaphors, but the call to “follow me” is every bit as much the call of the gospel. We can get deep in the Lutheran weeds and get all worried about passive righteousness. We can piously mumble true words about “I cannot by my own reason of strength follow Jesus”. But in the midst of the Christian life there are moments where it certainly feels like a choice. Like the one Jesus put to the rich man. The choice is really do we hear the gospel and walk in the way Jesus has laid out for us, or do we go our own way. So what I hoped the sermon opened up was not a list of preacher saying you must do x – which would all be great things for the preacher – but a space for the hearer to ask that question – “what must I do?” – and hear Jesus’ answer. These are your household gods and need to be left behind. Whatever they might be.

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Offer what Moses Commanded, for a witness to them…

Biblical Text: Mark 1:40-54
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Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace. A taking of the cleaning, the grace of Christ, without also taking on discipleship or the Lordship of Christ.

If you read this biblical text, you can’t help but think that cheap grace has been around for a long time. The leper is cleansed. But Jesus gives him two instructions. One we know he didn’t follow, and the second we get no report about. That second stern warning Jesus issued was, “offer what Moses commanded, for a witness to them.” We Lutherans would call that the 3rd use of the law. The law can’t save. What Moses commanded leads first to our death, but the law of Moses is still how God intended us to live. The moral law is God’s understanding of how to live a truly human life. And that is as far from cheap grace as possible. It is living that tough life, trying to live a clean life, that is a strong witness. And this is what Jesus sternly warns the healed to do.

The cleansing is grace. It is free. Christ has restored you. Do you settle for the cheap grace, or do take on the yoke of the disciple, the Lordship of the Christ who has made you clean?

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Discipleship: Dropping the nets, Identity and the Reign of God

Biblical Text: Mark 1:14-20
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I think it is sometimes difficult to relate the call to discipleship we hear in the gospels to our lives. These are men (and women) who literally dropped their nets. How do you proclaim that without completely gutting it or spiritualizing it too much?

The epiphany season’s texts give us some insight. God meets us where we are at. The specific call to discipleship, when God passes by, is different for everybody, but it has a couple of things that are the same for everybody. 1) We are all being made into fishers of men. All disciples are called to be part of the mission of God which is to save sinners. 2) Part of being made into fishers of men is finding our identity not in our nets or our family or our boats or any of the variety of things that define us. The disciple finds their identity in Christ. 3) Finding our identity in Christ means being part of the body of Christ – the church. We are all equally sinners at the foot of the cross. All equally saints washed in the blood. We have the same baptism and eat the same holy food.

Wherever you are at – and God condescends to us where we are at – you can be on that discipleship walk. Dropping the things that now define you is just as radical as dropping the nets.

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The Exclusive/Inclusive Jesus

Biblical Text of Sermon: John 1:43-51
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The modern world is one full of distractions. I’m the geek that as a kid you could find reading an encyclopedia. My schoolmates were sure that “Encyclopedia Brown” was biographical. But today I find myself reading a few pages and flitting off to something else. And the Kindle doesn’t help with that. That approach to spirituality and religion goes no place good. Oh you can fool yourself into thinking that you are getting a broader view or are just sharing in the wisdom. The problem is that everything else out there is a shadow compared to the reality of Jesus Christ. That is the Father’s Epiphany to us. Things we saw glimpses of elsewhere we see the fullness of in Jesus. And it takes time to incorporate an Epiphany – sometimes an entire life. Not the least because it usually demands that we change something in ourselves. To accommodate what we have become comfortable with to what Jesus intends. That is ultimately the question of discipleship. Do you want to stick around, go deep, to see the greater things of Jesus? Or is the world’s buffet too tempting?

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“Rosebud” – Discipleship Journeys

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The text of this sermon was John 1:29-42. That is two days of John the Baptist’s preaching and the evangelists account of the first disciples of Jesus. By telling us this account -which is starkly different that the synoptic (Matt/Mark/Luke) tradition, the evangelist invites us to ponder our own discipleship journey. Where are we? Are we on Jordan’s bank, but not really hearing the Baptist say there, right there! is the Lamb? Have we heard and are hoping to see? Have we seen and have joined the journey? Have we put the things we have seen into practice?

The connection with “rosebud” is seeing what is really important. Epiphany, the current season of the church, is a season to see. It is a season to ponder what is really important before the trials and tribulations. To find our rosebud’s and to see the rose which is blooming – foretold by Isaiah and seen today within our midst.

In a challenge note, go read John 1:19 – 2:1 and track the days. Keep track of what happens on each day. What day(s) are missing? What day(s) are ours to write our discipleship journeys on? Who revealed Christ to us? How are we part of that chain? How do we extend that witness?

The Disciple’s Life of Repentance

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Text: Luke 17:1-10

Luke 14:1 – 17:10 in my reading is one long extended teaching on being a disciple. The text for this sermon is the summary or conclusion of that section. I drew that boundary because in Luke 17:11 Jesus is no longer ping-ponging back and forth between disciples and Pharisees, but he is back on the road to Jerusalem. The entire Jerusalem road narrative is about discipleship, but this inner part has been more intense. It has been much more about how the disciple acts while Jesus is not present here and now.

The focus on being a disciple gives the section a heavy law feeling and it does end with millstones and the blunt saying about being an unworthy servant. But it is right there where the gospel enters. Of course that is how we would act. If we had a field slave and he came in we’d tell him to go clean up and make dinner. But that is not how God acts. In Christ – God serves the dinner and washes the feet. The unworthy slave is told to sit, eat, drink, rest…while the worthy son is crucified.

It is just that love for the unworthy slave that should inspire the life of repentance. We no longer have to look pious. We are not part of a religious club where membership depends upon our status or appearance. We have been seated at the table. We repent not because it atones for sin or gives us any merit. We repent because we desire to be closer to the heart and mission of the God who loved us first. We repent as a plea – Lord come quickly and finish what you started.